Turns Out, Baby Talk Is Actually Good for Your Kids

It seems like the jury is always out on baby talk (a.k.a that high-pitched voice you often fall into using with your kids). Our natural instincts lead us to use it with children, whether we realize we're doing it or not ... but we've heard more than once that we should ditch the "parentese" and talk to our kids like they're adults.

Well, the verdict is finally in.

Using baby talk with your children might actually be good for them, according to new research from Rutgers University. Even though experts have previously said that talking to our children like they're adults will help them to learn language faster, these new findings prove the opposite to be true.

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To study the effectiveness of baby talk, Rutgers researchers Patrick Shafto and Baxter Eaves broke down the vowel sounds of adult speech and created a mathematical model that predicted what speech patterns would look like if they were designed with the express purpose of teaching children. They then compared this new "teaching language" to the speech adults use when talking to each other and the speech they use when talking to children. Shafto and Eaves ultimately found that the baby talk was a much closer match.

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Although the researchers caution that their work is preliminary (and that the true effectiveness of this type of speech is a hard thing to measure), Shafto believes that it's easier for infants to process baby talk and turn it into language skills. "The sounds that are selected [with baby talk] exaggerate the important properties that babies need to attend to and learn about," Shafto said in an article about the research on the Rutgers website. "If you exaggerate in the correct way, what you get is a learner who learns more quickly from less data."

The ultimate takeaway from the new study is this: When you speak to your child with that high-pitched, exaggerated style of speech, they're more likely to pick up on speaking skills more quickly. And that's not a bad case for baby talk at all.